The object of this blog began as a display of a varied amount of writings, scribblings and rantings that can be easily analysed by technology today to present the users with a clearer picture of the state of their minds, based on tests run on their input and their uses of the technology we are advocating with www.projectbrainsaver.com

Saturday, 22 January 2011

JTMPAdmin | YouTube | 14 December 2010: http://www.op-critical.com - The #1 protest music band in America, Op-Critical, is back with a take on the Roger Waters classic "Another Brick in the Wall" medley. This version is called "Another Name on the Wall" and features awesome animation effects from the very artistic mind of Matt Brown, and collaborates with Gillian Brown and Sophia Fraser for some...

Sherry Marquelle | YouTube | 25 September 2010: Sherry Marquelle is a Native American with an Apache/Aztec heritage, who has been singing since childhood. Sherry uses her talents to inspire fellow Americans to get involved in the efforts to take our country back to the vision of our founding fathers and uphold the constitution. Like many of you, she is concerned about what the future will be for...

Now I am not a great fan of hip-hop or rap, but Big C is on the ball with this song, and many of his other songs. Therefore, even though this is not my usual kind of music, I am happy to promote it here. He is friends with FarhanK501, a real patriot who is trying to wake people up the the junk that is being pushed through modern music by the Illuminati and other Luciferian Cults within the music...

Shamarrallenmusic - 16 July 2010: Shamarr Allen, Dee-1, Paul Sanchez, and Bennie Pete get together to express their feelings about the Gulf Oil Spill. I don’t usually care for rap or hip hop much but that was one of the best damn songs I have heard for a long time… AKPC_IDS += "3853,";Popularity: 13% [?] Read More →

Police, national guards and firemen joined Saturday's protests, distancing themselves from the government [Reuters]

Thousands of demonstrators, including police officers, lawyers and students, have taken to the streets of Tunisia's capital in another day of unrest in the North African country.

While many protesters are continuing to demand the dissolution of the interim government, police officers who have also joined the protests are seeking better working conditions and an improvement to what they call unfair media portrayal.

Crowds gathered in front of the office of Mohamed Ghannouchi, the interim prime minister, and on Tunis' main street, the Avenue Habib Bourguiba. They were joined by members of the national guard and fire departments.

Al Jazeera's Nazanine Moshiri, reporting from Tunis, said that police were marching with protesters, wearing red armbands in solidarity with the marching crowds.

"They said they want to be with people now, they want to be part of the revolution," she said.

"They no longer want to be persecuted - they say, 'Please don't blame us for the deaths of the protesters'."

He reported that the anti-riot squad pleaded with the crowd, saying: 'Do whatever you want to do but please don't storm the office of the prime minister. That is a red line."

But protesters were already starting to break the barricades by late afternoon.

Masoud Romdhani, a trade union activist who was at the demonstration, told Al Jazeera that the protests must continue in order to oust the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD), the former ruling party, entirely.

He said that labour activists feel that "nothing is done" until the RCD is removed from the cabinet entirely.

Many are angry over the inclusion of several prominent members of Ben Ali's cabinet in the new interim government. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets on Friday as well, seeking the dissolution of the interim administration.

Ghannouchi's pledge

Sami Zaoui, Tunisian secretary for communication technologies, told Al Jazeera that more than two-thirds of the new government comes from "civil society" and opposition parties. He also downplayed the importance of the protests as "very local demonstrations".

"We can not say that the whole or the entire country is currently demonstrating," said Zaoui. He also said that he didn't feel the the prime minister was "in a difficult situation".

Yet, in an effort to dampen continued anger, Ghannouchi, a former ally of Ben Ali, has pledged to quit politics after elections that he says will be held as soon as possible.

In an interview on Tunisian television on Friday, Ghannouchi said he would leave power after a transition phase that leads to legislative and presidential elections "in the shortest possible timeframe".

Ghannouchi has said he will not run in presidential elections, which must be held within 60 days [Reuters]

He was a member the RCD. Despite resigning his membership in the party, he has been struggling to restore calm under a new multiparty government that the opposition complains retains too many RCD members.

"My role is to bring my country out of this temporary phase and even if I am nominated I will refuse it and leave politics," Ghannouchi said.

He did not say why he was leaving politics or specify when the elections would be held. He said the elections must be a success "to show the world that our country has a civilisation".

Ghannouchi also said that all of the assets held abroad by Ben Ali's regime had been frozen and would be returned to Tunisia after an investigation.

Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyedin, reporting from Tunis, said that Ghannouchi also announced that the state would provide compensation to those who died during the uprising, as well as their families.

The army and the justice department have been ordered to preserve any documents and evidence that can be gathered so the old government can be implicated throughout the investigation, our correspondent said.

Mourning period

Tunisia began three days of mourning on Friday, lowering flags to half-mast and broadcasting recitations of the Quran to mourn dozens who died in the protests that drove the Ben Ali from power.

Central Tunis has seen near-daily demonstrations in the past week by those who say the caretaker government is still too dominated by allies of the ousted president, but security forces and the army have not opened fire since Ben Ali's overthrow.

The US, meanwhile, has voiced support for the will of the Tunisian people.

"It is very important that we have a broad dialogue with civil society, some important steps have already been taken by authorising opposition parties and liberalising media coverage," PJ Crowley, the US state department spokesman, told Al Jazeera.

"These are important steps by clearly it needs to be more to satisfy the Tunisian people."

The US ambassador to Tunisia, Gordon Gray, told Al Jazeera earlier in his first public remarks on the uprising that the democratic transition remained "a work in progress" and represented "a new phenomenon".

Big Banking

The head of the commission reviewing whether the UK's biggest banks should be broken up is expected to say later that wide-ranging reform is needed.

In a speech in London, Sir John Vickers is set to confirm he is considering plans to separate banks' trading and retail operations.

These may require banks to put their investment arms into separate entities that could be allowed to collapse.

The BBC's Joe Lynam said "keeping the status quo is not an option".

Our correspondent added: "The public simply wouldn't wear things staying the same as they are forced to endure swingeing spending cuts and some tax rises as a direct result of reckless banking behaviour before the financial crisis of 2007/08."

In his speech, Sir John will stress that no final decisions have yet been made.

Bail-out

Sir John, a former chief economist at the Bank of England, is the chairman of the five-person Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) set up by the coalition government.

It is looking at financial stability and competition, including the question of what should be done about banks deemed "too big to fail".

One suggestion is that investment banks should be separated from retail banks, so that depositors' money is not put at risk by the investment banking arms of the business.

Equally, if banks were allowed to collapse if mismanaged, taxpayers would not need to come to the rescue.

Analysis

The ICB says it is not ruling anything out from its final conclusions.

That's not quite true.

Keeping the status quo is not an option for the commission. The government and the banking fraternity have all but accepted that.

The public simply wouldn't wear things staying the same as they are forced to endure swingeing spending cuts and some tax rises as a direct result of reckless banking behaviour before the financial crisis of 2007/08.

So this latest update from Sir John Vickers may prove to be the starting gun for a lobbying and PR onslaught from Britain's largest banks as they hope to limit the final recommendations by the ICB.

One option (short of breaking up the banks) is some sort of ring-fencing of banking activities - a process known as subsidiarisation.

This approach would mean the investment banking parts are financially, but not legally, separated from the more mundane retail parts.

This is what happened when the last Labour government bailed out both Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group when it deemed the risks to the wider financial system of allowing them to collapse were too great.

The commission is also looking at whether too few big banks have too much control over the retail banking sector in the UK.

Currently, the top six British banks control about 90% of all deposits. This compares with a 68% market share for Germany's top seven banks and just 35% for America's top eight.

Leaving home

Other topics for scrutiny include whether banks should be restricted in the amount of their own money they can use for investment trading.

Critics have said that splitting up banks could damage the UK's competitive edge and make banks leave the country.

HSBC and Standard Chartered have questioned whether they would keep their headquarters in the UK should the the commission recommended a break-up.

The other members of the ICB are former Ofgas director-general Clare Spottiswoode, ex-Barclays chief executive Martin Taylor, former JP Morgan co-chief executive Bill Winters, and Financial Times chief economics commentator Martin Wolf.

The ICB has until September 2011 to make its recommendations to the government.

MAG is working to protect returnees coming back to southern Sudan ahead of January’s referendum. MAG Community Liaison Manager Marysia Zapasnik reports from the grounds of the Southern Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Commission.

MAG has trained 154 staff from Sri Lankan non-governmental organisations in Mine Risk Education, to reduce the risk of death and injuries from landmine and unexploded ordnance for people who had fled fighting in the country.

The UK Government has appointed MAG to remove and destroy thousands of mines and unexploded ordnance, as well as run an education programme to teach communities to identify and report mines to local authorities.

Danish Demining Group, Handicap International and MAG have collaborated on Mine Risk Education materials to keep the people of Somaliland and Puntland, and especially children, safer as they go about their daily lives.

Communist Laos is one of the world's poorest countries, but the government is now beginning to experiment with capitalism in the hope it could bring prosperity.

Asian elephants have been used as beasts of burden for centuries

It was just after dawn when I took a motorised canoe across the brown river to meet 48-year-old Mae Bounnam.

As the sun began to rise, she made her way down the path from the jungle where she had been sleeping.

Mae is an Asian elephant, who has been rescued from a working life spent logging to become part of the new spirit of private enterprise in Laos.

The communist government is now encouraging private business and this elephant village outside the pretty town of Luang Prabang, famous for its Buddhist temples and orange-clad monks, is attracting plenty of tourists, keen to have the chance to see elephants close-up.

The old name for the kingdom of Laos supposedly translates as "the land of a million elephants". But although fewer elephants than that remain now, it turns out that with the addition of an accent the name translates as "valley of the elephants", so there probably never was a million.

When charging, elephants can reach speeds of 50kph (31mph)

Mae was blinded in one eye after it was slashed by a branch during her old job, and another injury has left her with a small hole in her right ear. But she is so vast that when her keeper, or mahout, and I ride her bareback she carries us as though we are as light as babies.

Then it is time for what he tells me is her favourite part of the day, and I ride from the muddy banks straight into the deepest part of the river where she appears to take pleasure in falling to her knees to dunk me.

While her barefoot mahout, Mr Lid, sits behind me casually playing with his Blackberry, I take a scrubbing brush and clean the leaves and dirt off the surprisingly delicate skin on her head and back.

In a country where employment opportunities are still few, working in tourism is one alternative to subsistence farming.

Safety songs

A day's drive west brings me to a region once again dominated by farming, but which feels as though it is poised for something new.

The old ordnance has its uses, but the threat of unexploded bombs remains

The area surrounding the town of Phonsavan is the most bombed in the world.

During the so-called secret war between 1964 and 1973, the US spent $2m (£1.3m) a day dropping bombs on this part of Laos in a failed attempt to prevent communism from taking hold.

The equivalent of a plane-full of bombs dropped every eight minutes for nine years.

On the so-called Plain of Jars, which contains hundreds of mysterious giant stone pots made over 2,500 years ago, I saw bomb craters the size of swimming pools.

Local people make use of the old ordnance. Rocket cases are used as window boxes and defused cluster bombs serve as ashtrays in cafes - one of which is even appropriately named Craters.

Yet thousands of items of unexploded ordnance remain and from time to time children still lose limbs from explosions after picking up the old cluster bombs, which look like shiny yellow tennis balls. The first safety songs they learn at school are not about crossing the road, but about the dangers of touching any metal they might find.

More than half the farmers in the region say they would like to expand their operations if it were not for the fear that cultivating more land might disturb an unexploded bomb.

An international charity, the Mines Advisory Group, is going through the painstaking work of trying to clear the area, and their spokesman tells me one fringe benefit is that the involvement of local women in this brave and vital job is improving the status of women in the town.

Looking at the job adverts in the local papers, it is clear that there are few opportunities apart from jobs with the developmental organisations working here.

Yet in this town new infrastructure is being built.

Walking around the flat, dusty town it is clear that there are high hopes for the future.

Not far from the old market where tiny birds are spatchcocked and barbecued, ready to eat whole, there are brand new buildings housing development corporations, each set back from the road with a grand driveway.

There is a dual carriageway with new street lighting which was put in just weeks ago. Yet as I walk along the pavement in the evening, barely a car or motorbike passes me on this perfect new road.

It almost feels like a larger town that is in limbo, waiting for a bigger future. But investment into the region is coming - from China, South Korea and Thailand - and people seemed optimistic. A few days ago the Laos stock exchange opened for the first time, starting with just two companies.

There is a sense that Laos is moving on from the old battles and hoping to follow its neighbour China into times of new prosperity.

The Hmong leader Vang Pao - who died recently - will be mourned by many, but his death also breaks one of the last links with the Indo-China wars.

In recent years he called for a new era of "peace, prosperity and reconciliation to return to Laos". People here Laos are hoping that private enterprise will provide the solution.

John Mohammed Butt: The hippy who became an imam

Forty years after following the hippy trail to South Asia, John Butt is still living in the region, and still spreading a message of peace and love - though now as an Islamic scholar.

As our car turned around the bumpy Indian road, a gleaming white marble minaret came into view. My fellow passenger, John Mohammed Butt, could barely contain his excitement.

"Can you see it?" he asks. "It's like the Oxford University of Islamic learning. For me these minarets and domes are just like the spires and towers of Oxford.

John Butt is the only Westerner to have graduated from Darul-Uloom Deoband

"It's been almost 30 years since I was last here and I am still getting the same thrill. This is my alma mater."

The alma mater in question is Darul-Uloom Deoband, South Asia's largest madrassa, or Islamic school.

Driving through the madrassa gates, we entered a world rarely seen by Western eyes.

Deoband was built in 1866 by Indian Muslims opposed to the then British rule. Little has changed since - winding streets and tiny courtyards lined with stalls selling fragrant chai, bubbling pots of rice and paintings of Mecca.

Everywhere are the Talibs, religious students, young men with dark-eyed fervent expressions carrying books or quietly reciting the Koran.

And in another scene reminiscent of Oxford, students riding bicycles.

A chai seller recognises John and runs towards him. "John Sahib, John Sahib."

The two had not seen each other in decades, yet the man remembers him instantly. "John Sahib was the only student I ever saw who used to go jogging.

"There was only one John Mohammed - unique," he laughs.

That is perhaps not so surprising, when you learn that John Butt remains the first and only Western man ever to have graduated from Deoband.

He showed me his old dormitory room, a windowless cell where he spent eight years in a life of virtual seclusion, living under a regime of prayer and Koranic study.

Imposing figure

But that is just one facet of this man's extraordinary life.

Aside from his time at Deoband, he has spent most of the past 40 years living among the fierce Pashtun tribes, who inhabit the lawless hinterland between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He went there in 1969, he says, as a dope-smoking young hippy and never came home.

He laughs. "When people call me an ageing ex-hippy, I always reply that I am ageing maybe, but I'm certainly not ex. I'm still a hippy."

John Butt cuts an imposing figure.

At 6ft 5ins (1.9m) tall, he sports a long white beard and alabaster skin that is almost translucent.

Dressed in flowing white ethnic robes, he reminds me of a Benedictine hermit monk or a Victorian explorer, swashbuckling straight out of the pages of an historical novel.

He tells me he adores the Queen, Stilton is his favourite cheese and that football is his passion.

Yet among the border tribes, he is regarded as a native Pashtun and revered as an Islamic scholar.

Home for him, until recently, was a tiny village in Pakistan's Swat valley.

Swat was once a popular tourist destination but is now the scene of regular battles between the Pakistani military and the Taliban.

But back in 1969, the young John was hooked from the moment he saw Swat, describing to me snow-capped mountains, rivers like flowing jewels, forests and alpine pastures.

It was, he says, "like Tolkien's Middle-earth, magical and other worldly" inhabited by tribal people who were "very pleasant, big-hearted, tolerant, easy-going and welcoming".

When his fellow hippies grew up and went home to become accountants and lawyers, John stayed on - becoming fluent in the Pashto language and studying Islam.

But John's world changed in the late 1980s, with the arrival of jihadists, who came to the border areas from all over the world to fight the war against the Russians in Afghanistan.

"I saw the rural, religious Pashtun way of life I had come to love so much being diluted, contaminated and poisoned, in particular by Arabs from the Middle East," he says.

"The way they practise Islam is very different to the tribal areas, but they used money and influence to impose their own set of values."

So he decided to fight for his adopted culture.

Peaceful Islam

In the early 1990s, he joined the BBC World Service Pashtu service and helped to set up New Home New Life, a now Iconic Afghan radio soap opera, known as The Archers of Afghanistan.

I've hired some of the best Islamic scholars in the region - pious, good and brave men

Six years ago, he set up a radio station which broadcasts across the Afghan-Pakistan border and which tries to promote tribal traditions along with peace and reconciliation.

More recently, John has switched his attentions back to Afghanistan and is spearheading the formation of a new Islamic university in the predominantly Pashtun city of Jalalabad.

"It makes perfect sense. There is currently nowhere in Afghanistan where a young man can do higher Islamic studies. They go to Pakistan, where as we know some of them have become radicalised," he says, emphasising that his university will give a platform to moderates.

But this promotion of peaceful Islam by the English former hippy has set him on a collision course with militants. His beloved Pakistan has now become too unsafe for him.

"Swat is a militarised zone and people I see as foreigners there now treat me like I'm the foreigner, even though I lived there for 40 years.

"It's hard to work out who is who any more - who is Taliban, who is criminal. The waters are very muddy."

Last year, waters of another kind finally put paid to his idyll, when his house was washed away in the floods which devastated the area and killed thousands.

"It was a relief in some ways. When I lost the house, I knew I'd never go back there."

Afghanistan has also become increasingly perilous after Taliban death threats.

The Taliban have delivered so-called night letters - notes hand-delivered in secret and at night for maximum impact - warning students not to study at the university and denouncing John as a Christian missionary or an "orientalist".

Death threats have also been made to his teachers and staff.

"I've hired some of the best Islamic scholars in the region - pious, good and brave men," he says. "They know this is for the benefit of Afghanistan and they insist they will stay working with me despite the dangers."

As I said goodbye, he was planning to travel to Jalalabad on the local bus. We talked about the possibility of him being attacked and he admitted he could easily be killed.

But when I asked if he was scared, he brushed me off with a shrug. "You only die once. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow."